This invention relates to medications cabinets and similar systems providing storage and access to patient pharmaceuticals and other items to be administered in a hospital, transitional care facility, clinic, or other health care facility where administration of the materials must be managed and controlled. The invention also concerns a simplified method and system for unlocking a patient-specific drawer of a wall-mounted or floor-mounted medications cabinet in or at a patient room, where the cabinet or a patient-specific drawer in it has been pre-loaded with prescription pharmaceuticals for an associated patient, and where the nurse or other care giver assigned to administer the medications can quickly and securely access the patient's assigned drawer (or other compartment).
Currently, to gain access to one of these in-room cabinets, an authorized user has to enter a user ID, which can be a machine readable code on a badge or card, or may be a code that the user enters at a keyboard. To gain access to the assigned drawer or compartment for a given patient, or to the cabinet in a single-patient room, the current systems may require a scan of the patient's wrist band to obtain the patient's assigned code to access the patient's drawer. This can involve use of a bar code scanner connected (wired or wirelessly) to the cabinet. This procedure can be tedious and time consuming when attending to numerous patients throughout a hospital shift. Where a proximity card or badge is required for access the patient's medications, the card or badge may be lost or misplaced or stolen, and used by a different person to obtain access to the medications in the cabinet. Biometric identification, which would make unauthorized access more difficult, is not available on a proximity-card based system.
An improved technique for improving the nurse access to the patient-specific medications drawer for each patient can involve a personal electronic device carried by the care giver, such as a smart cellular phone. Smart phones are often assigned to nurses or other health-care providers, and this is frequently the case in many hospitals. The smart phone may be combined with a near-filed communications (NFC) and/or simulated NFC tags or specially encoded bar codes with nurse authentication and time stamp for locking medications storage cabinets in patient rooms that are pre-loaded with the patients' prescribed medications as well as non-prescription items. The cabinets are kept locked, and typically one patient drawer is assigned per patient and these are individually unlocked to obtain that patient's prescriptions. Portable personal electronic devices (PED's), such as smart cellular phones could be used for rapidly unlocking these cabinets without compromising security. Alternatively, NFC tags could be used. A specially generated bar code with a time stamp that expires in a short time window may be used to prevent grant of access based on a printed bar code image, or access from a digital display of a bar code symbol that can be taken with a third-party cell phone.
To access the cabinet, a hand-held PED combines near-field communications (NFC) chip with a smart phone to allow the nurse to unlock the cabinet or drawer of cabinet for the given patient. NFC is preferred over low power Bluetooth as it is limited to 10 cm (whereas Bluetooth could unlock the cabinet and also another nearby cabinet if within a range of 50 to 100 feet). Android phones can be configured to simulate an NFC tag which is preferable to using a static tag, for the reason that by using a phone app, the authorized user can be required to scan in a thumbprint or fingerprint to unlock the phone to “display” the simulated tag. The phone would only present the NFC tag, and signal a drawer-open command, after the nurse holding the phone is identified as authorized.
Another related possibility would use a facility on the phone to simulate this NFC technique using an available bar coding provision in the phone and in the cabinet to unlock the given cabinet or drawer.